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An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory

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An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory PD Dr. Thomas Lemke Institute for Social Research Senckenberganlage 26 60325 Frankfurt am Main [email protected] An indigestible meal? Foucault, governmentality and state theory In his lectures of 1978 and 1979 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault responded to some Marxist critics who had complained that the “genealogy of power” lacked an elaborated theory of the state. 1 Foucault remarked that he had refrained from pursuing a theory of the state “in the sense that one abstains from an indigestible meal” (2004: 78). 2 However, a few sentences later Foucault states: “The problem of state formation is at the centre of the questions that I want to pose.” (2004: 79) This article explores this apparent contradiction and investigates the contribution of an “analytics of government” to state theory. This approach takes up methodological and theoretical considerations that Foucault developed in his “history of ‘governmentality’” (1991a: 102). It has three analytical dimensions. First, it presents a nominalist account that stresses the central importance of knowledge and political discourses in the constitution of the state. Secondly, an analytics of government uses a broad concept of technology that encompasses not only material but also symbolic devices, including political technologies as well as technologies of the self. Third, it conceives of the state as an instrument and effect of political strategies that define the external borders between the public and the private and the state and civil society, and also define the internal structure of political institutions and state apparatuses. After presenting the three analytical dimensions, the last part of the article will compare this theoretical perspective with the concept of governance and with critical accounts of neo-liberalism. 1 This paper has been accepted for publication in Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory and the final version of this paper will be published in No. 15, 2007. I would like to thank William Walters for some valuable suggestions and comments as well as the journal’s two reviewers whose remarks helped sharpen the argument. Research support for this paper was provided by a Heisenberg Grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG). 2 Quotations from French and German have been translated by the author. 1 1. Governmentality and transformations of statehood Foucault proposed the concept of governmentality for the first time in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978 and 1979 (2004; 2007). The notion derives from the French word gouvernemental , meaning “concerning government” (see Senellart, 2004: 406). The word “governmentality” was known even before it figured as a central term in Foucault’s work. Roland Barthes had already used the “barbarous but unavoidable neologism” (1989: 130) in the 1950s, to denote an ideological mechanism that presents the government as the origin of social relations. For Barthes, governmentality refers to “the Government presented by the national press as the Essence of efficacy” (1989: 130). Foucault takes up this “ugly word” (2007: 115), but detaches it from the semiological context. Governmentality no longer refers to a mythological symbolic practice that depoliticizes social relations, but represents the “rationalisation of governmental practice in the exercise of political sovereignty” (2004: 4). Foucault deploys the concept of governmentality as a “guideline” for a “genealogy of the modern state” (2007: 354) embracing a period from Ancient Greece up until contemporary forms of neo-liberalism. I wish to emphasize two points here, as they seem important for an adequate assessment of the innovative potential of an analytics of government. First of all, the concept of governmentality demonstrates Foucault’s working hypothesis concerning the reciprocal constitution of power techniques and forms of knowledge and of regimes of representation and modes of intervention. Government defines a discursive field in which exercizing power is “rationalized.” Ways in which this occurs include the delineation of concepts, the specification of objects and borders, and the provision of arguments and justifications. In this manner, government makes it possible to address a problem and offers certain strategies for managing or solving the problem. Second: rather than presenting an analysis of the development and transformation of political- administrative structures, Foucault concentrates on the multiple and diverse relations between the institutionalization of a state apparatus and historical forms of subjectivation. He endeavors to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual co-determine each other’s emergence. Like Norbert Elias (1976) he is interested in the long- term processes of co-evolution of modern statehood and modern subjectivity. But whereas Elias relies on a general theory of civilization presupposing a single historical logic of development (“the process”), Foucault analyzes heterogeneous and plural “arts of government” (2004: 4). He refers to the older meaning of the term government (Sellin 1984; Senellart 1995). While the word has a purely political meaning today, Foucault is able to 2 show that up until well into the 18 th century the problem of government was placed in a more general context. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts but also in philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogic texts. In addition to management by the state or administration, government also addressed problems of self-control, guidance for the family and for children, management of the household, directing the soul, and other questions. For this reason, Foucault defines government as conduct, or, more precisely, as “the conduct of conduct” and thus as a term which ranges from “governing the self” to “governing others” (Foucault, 2000a: 340-342). To mark the conceptual difference between this wider notion and the more recent concept of government, Foucault distinguishes between the “problematic of government in general” and “the political form of government” (1991a: 88). To be sure, Foucault’s “genealogy of governmentality” is more of a fragmentary sketch than an elaborated theory, and most of it is to be found in lectures that were never prepared for publication. Nevertheless, the concept of governmentaliy has inspired many studies in the social sciences and historical investigations. Especially in Great Britain, Australia, Canada and the US (Burchell, Gordon and Miller, 1991; Barry, Osborne and Rose, 1996; Dean and Hindess, 1998; Dean and Henman, 2004), but also in Germany and France (Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke, 2000; Pieper, Gutiérrez Rodriguez 2003; Meyet, Naves and Ribemont, 2005), scholars have sought to refine and extend Foucault’s work as a tool for the critical analysis of political technologies and governmental rationalities in contemporary societies. 3 A major focus of studies of governmentality has been the shift from the Keynesian welfare state toward so-called free market policies and the rise of neo-liberal political projects in Western democracies. An analytics of government helps to provide a dynamic analysis that does not limit itself to statements about the “retreat of the state” or the “domination of the market”, but deciphers the apparent “end of politics” as a political program. As many scholars have noted, the critique of direct state interventions is a positive technique of government which entails a transfer of the operations of government to non-state actors. As a result, current political changes are understood not as a decline of state sovereignty but as a promotion of forms of government that foster and enforce individual responsibility, privatized risk-management, empowerment techniques, and the play of market forces and entrepreneurial models in a variety of social domains (Rose and Miller, 1992; O’Malley, 1996; Rose 1996; Cruikshank, 1999; Henman, 2004). While the concept of governmentality provides a very promising tool for the analysis of transformations in (contemporary) statehood, there are also some limitations and blind spots 3 For overviews of “studies of governmentality”, see Dean, 1999; Lemke, 2000; Meyet, 2005. 3 to be noted. To start with, it is mostly the territorially sovereign nation state that serves as the implicit or explicit frame of reference in the governmentality literature. This perspective is often informed by a Eurocentric approach excluding all forms of “fragmented” or “graduated sovereignty” (Ong, 2005) that characterize statehood in many parts of the world (Schlichte 2005). Until more recently, studies of governmentality mostly neglected non-Western as well as non-liberal contexts (Sigley 2006). Furthermore, there is rarely any consideration of how transformations of Keynesian forms of government on a national level are linked with international developments or of how the appearance of new actors on the global or European scale is paralleled by a displacement of the competences of the nation state. 4 Such an approach makes it impossible to investigate the new forms of government that are indicated by the increasing significance of international, supranational and transnational organizations like the UN, IMF and World Bank, and it does not account for the new role of transnational alliances of Nongovernmental Organizations. As James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta rightly stress, it is necessary to extend an analytics of government to include modes of government that are being set up on a transnational and global
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